


Nobody's Business

by napandasandwich



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Blob!Cecil, Cecil is Inhuman, M/M, Social drinking, Tentacle Sex, Tentacles, Walking In On Someone, team science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-25
Updated: 2013-11-25
Packaged: 2018-01-02 14:01:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1057635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/napandasandwich/pseuds/napandasandwich
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fill for a Night Vale Kink Meme prompt: "The other scientists walk in on Cecil and Carlos having sex, and they find are okay with it." </p><p>Complete prompt and link to fill in the end notes. Sorry about the lack of cake, OP!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nobody's Business

A new round of grant funding had come though that week and on Friday most of the lab went out to celebrate with $6 pitchers at the Punching Cactus. 

After the third round Carlos had gotten a text and decided to go home early. To sleep, he'd said. Then he'd paid for the next round, smiled that dazzling smile, and slipped out past the delighted hooting and suggestive gestures of whole the bar.

Sometime after 3am, Jeff, the lab's climatology specialist, finally jams the right key into the lab's deadbolt and stumbles through the door, not turning the lights on. Tanisha, Juana, Mark, Sam, and that new lab tech whose name is Rashid or something, are all still behind him, not yet through the door. They're arguing in the manner of inebriated scientists, which is to say semi-incoherently, passionately, and with citations.

Several impressions hit him at once: the sweetness of saltwater, the sharpness of ozone, and the low pungent note of sex. The fact that the warm air seems humid against his skin. But when his eyes report he's confused, because they're trying to tell him that he's seen this before, somehow, even though the rest of his brain is shouting "impossible!". 

Across the lab and through the frame of the open breakroom door, he can definitely make out Carlos on the couch. But instead of Cecil there's a writhing something that brings to mind a cuttlefish. Only it's really big. ( _Maybe a lot of cuttlefish?_ his mind shakily suggests.) Whatever it is, it's brightly colored and iridescent even from across the room, and there are definitely tentacles involved. 

Jeff immediately wants to get closer, because he always wants to get closer, because that's what being a scientist means.

A loud moan clears up his lingering fear that Carlos might somehow be in danger and also the question of when he should start backing away (knowing when to back away is very important for a scientist). Definitely not danger, and definitely time to beat a quiet retreat. For science.

Unfortunately, this is the moment his colleagues barrel past him in a tangle of limbs and labcoats, finally unable to be contained in the hallway. Juana hits the lights before Jeff can say anything and immediately shrieks. Mark, startled, falls sideways into a rack of clean glassware. 

Across the room the breakroom door slams closed, and Tanisha slips on a pyrex beaker and goes down. Sam is laughing so hard they fall over. Rashid, looking bewildered, stands still among the chaos for a moment until a hand, flailing, reaches out of the pile and pulls him over as well.

Across the room there's a series of thumps, followed by what sounds like a brief argument behind the breakroom door. Then the door opens, and Carlos slips out into the lab, closing the door behind him. His shirt is on backwards and the tag is sticking out. His hair is mussed.

Carlos leans back against the closed door in a protective gesture and clears his throat. He’s not looking at them, and he's blushing so hard Jeff thinks he might combust. "Uh, I'm sorry you guys, I didn’t, uh…"

But before he can say anything else Juana flings herself into his arms, giggling, and Jeff hears her say directly into his ear at a volume much louder than a whisper: "Bagged yourself a grand-prize boyfriend and you didn't even tell me, Carlos, how _could you_?"

And suddenly Jeff remembers.

Some years ago, on a different research project and a different continent entirely, he'd appropriated Carlos' laptop to check his mail and accidentally closed the browser. When he'd reloaded the program, a window with dozens of tabs opened on top. The page was a porn site, and the embedded video was so exotic that he'd watched in fascination for a full minute before quitting the browser and closing the computer, never to “borrow” Carlos' laptop ever again.

He'd looked it up later (scientific curiosity and all that), and apparently tentacle porn is a pretty widely-known and well-catered-to fetish. Most of it was animated, and captivating in an intellectual sense, and Jeff had put it out of his mind. There had been a girlfriend of his during post-grad who had broken up with him for being “too vanilla” and after he’d gotten over the breakup and looked up what the term meant, he’d decided that what he liked in bed, what his ex liked in bed, and what anyone liked in bed, was all fine and none of his damn business anyway.

Also, during the team’s first few shell-shocked months in Night Vale, various things had been discussed after near-death experiences and tequila shots. Among them was the revelation that Juana and Mark had known Carlos since undergrad and tentacles had been a thing for him then too. In fact, Jeff now had a more detailed understand of that particular sexual proclivity than he'd even imagined he would, but then, this was after a day so terrible and a during a conversation so blunt that everyone had woken up in the morning with a newfound respect for each other as complex human beings along with their newfound and nigh-crippling collective fear of bread. Being trapped together in this Twilight Zone of a town had a certain way of putting things into perspective.

And Night Vale definitely had its own rules. Tentacles wouldn't be that weird. Not after the epidemic of horns or the woman who came in to see if they could do something about her independently sentient fifth arm. Many Night Vale citizens had extra eyes, or no faces, and it wasn't considered a big deal. "Most scientifically interesting community in the US" was an understatement.

The door to the breakroom cracks open and Cecil, immaculately dressed, slips carefully into the room, shoulders hunched and obviously expecting Harsh Word or even Thrown Objects. He's also blushing an attractive shade of light purple.

There's a moment of tense silence, punctuated only by the hum of equipment.

Then Sam says, "Way to go, Carlos!" and there's a muffled shout of something either encouraging or extremely suggestive from the floor. Juana laughs from where she's draped over Carlos' (unfairly well-defined) shoulder. 

"We were going for the bottle of rum behind the minifridge," She says, only slurring a little. Then she totters over to the closest clean work surface, rests one hip against the counter, and looks at them both with an expression of knowing amusement barely dampened by the fact that she’s clutching the counter for support. "If I go in there now am I going to be surprised by anything? Not that I really care, but they kicked us out at last call." 

Cecil turns to stare at his boyfriend, incredulity on his face. Carlos, if possible, turns a darker shade of red. He looks helplessly to Cecil, and does something with his (impossibly handsome) eyebrows that looks painful. Cecil looks from the scientists on the floor to Carlos to Juana, and finally manages to choke out a high-pitched, "No!" 

It's so completely unlike his usual voice that Tanisha and Mark, who had been trying to get up, fall over again in a heap completely unbefitting the number of advanced degrees between them. From the pile Tanisha's hand emerges, brandishing a middle finger. Sam, still giggling, slips into the breakroom after the rum.

Carlos and Cecil share a look, and then Carlos stares at the inebriated wreckage of his team with something like baffled gratitude. "Okay. Um. Sorry you walked in on us. We're… going home." He takes Cecil's hand and sighs. "Drink some water, everyone, and I guess I'll see you on Monday." Then he leads the increasingly confused-looking radio announcer through the door to third floor apartments.

As the door swings closed behind them, Jeff blinks and remembers something else. "Shit,” he says, “The biologists won the pool." Then he too slips to the floor, finding it’s a less complicated place to be anyway. Juana makes her way over and eventually Sam returns with the rum (apparently the breakroom now smells strongly of burnt sugar). 

They make do with the floor.

In the morning Carlos will bring down a pot of coffee for them but otherwise leave them to suffer their hangovers. On Monday he'll give them a lecture on lab safety, and then let them spend the rest of the day investigating something anomalous happening somewhere dim and quiet. No one will comment on the perfectly circular hickeys trailing down the side of his neck, and there will be no jokes about sea creatures or weird fetishes. The lab will continue to treat Cecil as their liaison with the locals, and Sam will occasionally blush when Cecil's show comes on the radio. The sun will continue to be hot, the moon beautiful, and compared to the mysterious lights in the night sky what Cecil does or does not have under his sweater vest will both be a low priority and nobody’s business but his.

After all, there's science to be done.

**Author's Note:**

> Original prompt: "Carlos' fellow scientist walk in on Cecil and Carlos having sex involving Cecil's tentacles. And rather than being horrified or embarrassed, they all just laugh. After all these are some of the folks who have been stuck with Carlos since their undergrad days and each and every single one of them have walked in on him jerking it to tentacle hentai. To be honest they are happy for him, I mean how many fanboys get to find a real life sexual partner with fully functioning tentacles. They might even get a gluten free cake for Carlos to celebrate the occasion, because the eccentric but lovable roommate used to wake them up in undergrad and grad school with "congrats on the sex" cakes.  
> "(TL;DR the other scientists walk in on Cecil and Carlos having sex, and they find are okay with it.)"
> 
> Filled here: http://nightvalekink.livejournal.com/553.html?thread=28713#t28713
> 
> (P.S. My apologies for any grammatical errors or misspellings! Maybe the shadow government's army of drugged and costumed bears will bring me a beta reader for Xmas.)


End file.
